On the web, the body type for articles here is a sans-serif. On the printed page, I think that serif fonts are easier to read so I reset the font-family to Georgia. No background and black text is the default, but just in case, I explicitly declare it in the body.

2. Use as much of the page as possible

Again, I think this is default behavior, but since I wrap my content in a “page” tag anyway I thought I would make use of that to set a 100% width and remove any margin and padding.

3. Default styling ain’t bad for print

Notice that I didn’t do typographic styling whatsoever except setting the font. Default print styling does, what I feel, is a pretty decent job here on it’s own. This is assuming that you are using quality markup. In my articles, the title is an &lth2&gt tag, the sub-titles are <h3> tags, and the body paragraphs are in <p> tags. This results in a nice hierarchy of font sizes on the printed page without any styling necessary.

Code samples, which are wrapped in <code> and <pre> tags default to a monospace font, which is great. Unordered lists get a healthy indent and are bulleted.

3. Remove the extra stuff

Chances are, if someone is printing an article of yours it is because they want to save the content as reference material, read it later, or share it with a friend. They really don’t need to see your page navigation, sidebar, or fancy footer. Again assuming that you have nice and semantically marked up code, removing those sections should be as easy as setting the display value of the parent elements of those areas to none.

4. Display the URLs in the body content

[Thanks to David Walsh for this idea] Links in your content don’t do any good on the printed page. It would be pretty cool if you could just tap the linked word with your finger and it would open the webpage on your computer, but thats something I haven’t even seen in the movies yet. For now, we can just use CSS pseudo class “:after” to drop in the URL right next to the link, using the content attribute. IE doesn’t support it, but c’est la vie.

5. Include a thank-you note

At the end of my content, I put a little “thank you” note. This area gets hidden on the web, but is displayed when printing the article. I think it’s just a nice touch and also serves as a reminder they should come back to the website for fresh stuff.

6. Optional: Page breaks

I didn’t feel my articles really warranted specific page breaks, but if you write really long articles with sub headers, you should definitely consider placing page breaks before each of those sub headers. Another place that would be good to use a page break is right before a fairly large table. Nothing is worse than having to flip between pages looking at a table because it happened to fall overlapping two pages when it could have fit onto one. I plan to use these on a case-by-case basis. More on page breaks here.

Sunday, September 8, 2013

The default way to include an external stylesheet is to use the the link tag inside your pages head:

<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="default.css" />

That is a tried and true method and supports the whole spectrum of browsers from old and ancient to hip and modern. But let’s say you grow tried of the old and ancient… You don’t want your page to be completely unusable, but you would rather it look completely non-styled than broken and clumsy. You could use an @ rule to declare your CSS instead like this:

<style type="text/css" media="all">@import url(default.css);</style>

This leaves outdated browsers like Netscape 4.x out of the mix and will deliver to them a style-less page. Assuming your markup is good, you should be fine.

At-Rules are good for other fanciness, but none of it as globally effective as this. Internet Explorer (IE) supports the embedding of external font faces with @ rules, which is something every designer should drool over, but IE is the only one on the bandwagon which makes it mostly pointless and implementing it would be a step in the wrong direction. A better way to embed font’s (on a small scale) is to use sIFR, which we will cover if we can find some way to relate it to CSS =)

Wednesday, July 31, 2013

Many small business owners think that promoting and branding
their business will cost them huge amount. They generally are weak in
finances and look for cheaper alternatives that can make a huge impact.
Maintaining a good website with a decent blog is one such alternative
that helps small business promote their businesses cost-effectively.

Having
a blog in your small business website is very important. It has
multiple advantages - it helps you gain your readers' trust, drives more
traffic and expands your brand. A blog adds value to your Internet
marketing strategy, and it enhances the interaction and engagement with
customers. Let us discuss why you should consider having a blog in your website.

A blog is an inexpensive means of communicating with your customers
Blogging
is an inexpensive way to brand and promote your business and a great
way to communicate and connect with your potential customers. Through
the blog, you can send messages to customers, reply to the comments and
address their concerns instantly.

It is an inexpensive tool for
communicating with customers and a low cost method to get your company's
name out in the World Wide Web and reach a larger set of targeted
audience. Literally, maintaining a blog (creating content, publishing
and responding to comments) for the full month costs lesser than 1/10 of
a 10-second TV ad during prime time.

A blog enables you to interact with your
customers regularly. Interaction with customers gives good insights. As
you keep posting good content, over time customers are likely to develop
trust and you will earn their goodwill. Your blog is likely to become
an important source of information for customers. It improves your
relationship with your customers.

Customers can express their concern as and when they need
The blog in your website helps customers express their view point on your
product/service. They may express their genuine concerns on the blog any
time. They can simply write their view point and post it immediately.

Watch
out for such comments. Be proactive while replying to the legitimate
concerns and posting content. This is likely to make customers loyal to
your business. Such loyal customers are likely to yield conversions. It
helps in measuring user experience and keeping a track of what users are
saying about the business.Blog helps in better search engine rankings
Blogging
regularly helps in improving search engine rankings. Search engines
have a positive impression on blogs that are active, accurate and
provide authoritative and original content. Search engines look for
fresh content and give prominence to websites with such content. Your
blog is the best way to provide fresh content. Small business owners
need to remember that, to get the most out of their blog, they need to
monitor and update their blog regularly.

Better late than never, small business owners should realize the importance of a blog in their website and maintain it properly to attract more traffic and sales to
their business. So, in order to be successful, keep blogging regularly.

Tuesday, July 30, 2013

Button states saved as images and toggled by
CSS are so out of date it’s painful. We should all be using CSS3 to
create buttons. We all know why: they’re easily editable,
cross-platform, lightweight, accessible; the list of benefits is
endless.

What’s not always so easy is coding them up. Sure you can use a
framework, but for most projects that’s just too big of an overhead.
Maybe you want to stick to flat design; just add a background color and
make sure the default border is removed. Anyone else will be delighted
that Irina Petculescu, a self proclaimed CSS3 junky and founder of prowebdesign.ro has put together these free CSS3 buttons. See her site for more freebies.
They come in two styles: flat, which maintains a small bevel; and
glossy, with nicely rendered gradients. There’s even some basic
transitions to make the rollovers nice and smooth.
What’s even better is that the team made sure they used rgba
formatting for the styling, leaving the background colors in hex format.
That means you’re free to change any of the hex colors you see in the
CSS and the button background color will change instantly.

The buttons are free for personal and commercial use, so download them now and start tweaking them for your brand.

Sunday, July 28, 2013

The number of e-commerce websites currently in operation is said to be in the millions. This means there's huge potential for businesses to reap rich profits by taking their marketing online. If you're a web designer, you know just how lucrative website development is.

This huge number should be cause for motivation. Competing against well-known companies and their online stores is not easy but wholly possible by focusing on the target market and presenting products and services in an easy-to-understand manner. Inspiration can be sought from any one of the top websites out there but make sure you don't forget to follow these important tips.

Layout

There's no standard layout as this depends on the client, the designer and what the business is trying to sell. For example, a clothing retail store follows fashion's footsteps so it can't be devoid of trendy elements. Similarly, an electronics store is part of technology and the use of clean lines and futuristic accents complement what's being sold.

Search bar

In a store selling thousands or millions of products, customers don't have the patience going through everything. A visible and properly functional search bar makes it easy to filter items even with the inclusion of filters.

Filter

Filters like 'Men', 'Women' in a clothing or footwear store are standard. Under them, more options like 'size', 'color', 'tops/shirts', 'skirts/pants', 'stilettos/loafers' etc must be included. First-time shoppers are taking a risk by shopping online and they'll want to make sure products fit. Filters make the experience easier and give them confidence.

Images

The use of medium to large images is recommended because tiny photos don't show details clearly. High resolution images optimized for fast loading and expansion are close as customers get to touching them. The use of editing software to clean up photos is, of course, necessary but not so much so that products look artificial.

Images for a product should have different views, front, back, side, underside (for shoes, toys, electronics etc). A 360-degree view should be used for complex products with many parts.

Breadcrumb navigation

Breadcrumb navigation gives a user a clear view (through links) of the pages he's visited in a website. An example is Home-Men's footwear-Lifestyle-. This system enables him to go back to any one of the three links instead of pressing 'back' several times on the browser.